Indiscriminate Transgressions

Right.

So, if you bore yourself with the last post, you’ll note after the screwup there, they finally promised me really and truly that my credit card was charged to pay my deposit, and that I would have service restored in about an hour.

That was at 6pm.

So I did a little work, tried again at 8pm, still nothing. So I called and put Sprint on speakerphone again for the 20 minute hold, then when I got a person, they told me that what the previous person meant was 4 hours until I’d be turned back on.

So at 11:15pm, still nothing. So I called Sprint back (I’m rapidly approaching the number of calls that get one booted from their customer base, methinks) and this time I’m told tomorrow morning.

So I decide to try the magic words. “Well then, cancel my service.” Boom, whisked over to a really nice guy named Mark. So then Mark:

1. Tells me that my account has been “expired”
2. Informs me that the phone number assigned to my datacard has been released or reassigned
3. Tries to call his help desk, to get it fixed
4. Tells me his help desk is closed, that he will have to “fix it [him]self over the internet”
5. Takes my phone number and tells me he’s going to call me back

An hour goes by, Mark calls me back and says I’m all set. The card is able to connect again. I still can’t log into sprint.com, Mark tells me to try my password in upper case. Still nothing. So I’d imagine that the password is screwed up and I’ll never be able to talk to customer service again. (He tells me to do the lost password thing, I explain to him that it sends a text message with the password which is irretrievable from the data card, he laughs at this.)

I explain to Mark that I’ve called customer service a LOT and that I don’t want to do that anymore cos I don’t want Sprint to fire me as a customer. He laughs and tells me those people are “1/1000 of the 50,000,000 customers” they have (he did his math wrong), that they called in a LOT and that they had free service for months and months, and then he gives me some b.s. assurance that THIS TIME it is a done deal. I say right, but I’m rapidly becoming that customer you describe due to Sprint’s screwups that result in calls and credits to my bill. He laughs at this and says “yeah, I can see that.” Is that a threat? I don’t know anymore, I feel like the laws of the universe don’t apply to this situation.

As Mark and I are wrapping up the call, he says some funny things.

1. I ask “are there any other ways that my service will be screwed up in the next few weeks?” He laughs and says “Oh, [ha ha] there’s a million things that can go wrong [ha ha ha].” That instills confidence.
2. Then he says, and I kid you not, “Thanks for calling Sprint, and I’m glad we could take care of it in one call tonight, now you have a good evening.”

So I am going to have a good evening. Luckily, I have 2-5 internet connections at any given time; I’m always evaluating and recommending new technologies and incorporating them into projects. If you are thinking about using Sprint’s data service and relying upon it in any way, here’s a hearty recommendation AGAINST following that course of action. I know I will never use their service in any kind of project I do that requires an internet connection. HSDPA through Cingular/AT&T is probably better even with the whole latency thing. Yeah, the connection will be slower, but maybe it will stay on for more than 36 hours at a time.

Maybe somehow this will be the last time I need to contact them. ha ha ha

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Customer Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.